September 2013 – Page 4 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 177

A new Wicker Man poster by Dan Mumford appears on the cover of the forthcoming DVD/BR reissues. Prints are available.

• The long-awaited release of a restored print of Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man approaches. Dangerous Minds has a trailer while The Guardian posted a clip of the restored footage. The latter isn’t anything new if you’ve seen the earlier uncut version, but the sound and picture quality are substantially better. I’ve already ordered my copy from Moviemail.

• “It’s a fairly bleak place, and it has this eerie atmosphere. East Anglia is always the frontline when there’s an invasion threatening, so there are lumps of concrete dissolving into sand, bits of barbed wire and tank tracks that act as a constant reminder. I really love it.” Thomas Dolby talking to Joseph Stannard about environment and memory.

• Dome Karukoski is planning a biopic of artist Tom of Finland. Related: Big Joy, a documentary about the life and work of James Broughton, poet, filmmaker and Radical Faerie.

The desire to be liked is acceptable in real life but very problematic in fiction. Pleasantness is the enemy of good fiction. I try to write on the premise that no one is going to read my work. Because there’s this terrible impulse to grovel before the reader, to make them like you, to write with the reader in mind in that way. It’s a terrible, damaging impulse. I feel it in myself. It prevents you doing work that is ugly or upsetting or difficult. The temptation is to not be true to what you want to write and to be considerate or amusing instead.

Novelist Katie Kitamura talks to Jonathan Lee.

• Leonora Carrington: The Celtic Surrealist opens on Wednesday at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.

• Julia Holter turns spy in the video for This Is A True Heart.

• Alexis Petridis talks to graphic designer Peter Saville.

Al-Naafiysh (The Soul) by Hashim. From the Program Your 808 poster series by Rob Rickets.

• Rob Goodman on The Comforts of the Apocalypse.

• Post-Medieval Illustrations of Dante’s Sodomites.

• Annoy Jonathan Franzen by playing Cat Bounce!

• Paolozzi at Pinterest

• The Surrealist Waltz (1967) by Pearls Before Swine | The Jungle Line (1981) by Low Noise (Thomas Dolby) | Al-Naafiysh (The Soul) (1983) by Hashim

Abraxas 4

My thanks to Livia Filotico at Fulgur Esoterica for sending these previews from the forthcoming issue of Abraxas, the Journal of Esoteric Studies. Abraxas is a beautifully produced large-format book whose artist interviews—as I’ve mentioned before—are especially valuable. Issue 4 will include:

Prof. Sarah Victoria Turner’s interview with artist Christine Ödlund on theosophy and synaesthesia, a special feature on the Italian artist Agostino Arrivabene, a documentation of Art Angel artist Lindsay Seer’s ancestral performance/installation Nowhere Less Now, Shannon Taggart’s extraordinary photographs of Brooklyn vodou and Valentin Wolfstein insightful analysis of the Mystic Fool. Following this tarot theme, the artist Francesca Ricci provides an account of her working with urban symbols, and their subsequent transformation into a unique tarot, titled Anarca.

Mention of combining urban symbols with the Tarot sounds especially interesting after I’ve recently dealt with that challenge myself. Those who buy the limited edition hardback will receive a signed suite of Francesca Ricci’s Tarot cards. Abraxas 4 is published on September 22nd. Further details and page previews here.

Nowhere Less Now by Lindsay Seer.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Abraxas: The International Journal of Esoteric Studies

Foutaises

Foutaises (1989) is the French title of this 9-minute film by Jean-Pierre Jeunet whose English translation, Things I Like, Things I Don’t Like, is a clumsy, if accurate, summation of the content. It’s mostly a string of sight gags with Jeunet regular Dominique Pinon running through a list of his likes and dislikes, some of which are very funny. I first saw this on a VHS release of Delicatessen, a good pairing since the films were made almost back-to-back, and share actors. Foutaises shows both the strengths and weaknesses of Jeunet’s style: many isolated moments of visual humour work well in a short dose but stretched over 90 minutes the same technique can easily become tiresome or annoying.

On YouTube there’s a choice of a low-res copy with English subtitles or a better quality copy in French only. Take your pick. According to the discussion at IMDB the film can currently be found as an extra on the French DVD of Amélie.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Bunker of the Last Gunshots

The Bunker of the Last Gunshots

Jean-Pierre Jeunet is known these days as a director in his own right but he started out working in collaboration with Marc Caro, a writing and directing partnership that lasted up to The City of Lost Children in 1995. Given how much I enjoyed that film, and their earlier Delicatessen (1991), I suspect it’s Caro’s sensibility I respond to. I loathed Jeunet’s Alien Resurrection so much I refuse to watch it again (for me the Alien series ends with Ripley’s swan dive at the end of the third film), and I’ve shunned Amelie and everything he’s done since.

The Bunker of the Last Gunshots (1981) is an early Caro/Jeunet work set in the same retro environment as Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, with equally eccentric or unpleasant characters and the same antiquated technology. There’s no dialogue, and the narrative is conveyed obliquely at best. Even more than their feature films this is a vehicle for conveying a mood, the concern here being less with story and more with monochrome visuals, chiaroscuro lighting and bits of grotesquery among the all-male inhabitants of a bunker from some unspecified war. For a low-budget piece it’s very assured, and if you’d seen this in 1981 you’d be expecting the pair to go on to bigger and better things. The Bunker of the Last Gunshots runs for 25 minutes; there’s a rough copy on YouTube or a better one at Vimeo.

Qualia

Qualia is a 10-minute film by Vincent Ciciliato subtitled “A remake of Salò“, a reference to Pasolini’s notorious Sadeian indictment of Italian Fascism, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). Calling this a remake is something of a stretch, it’s more accurate to describe it as a mash-up of vague gestures in the direction of Pasolini’s grim tableaux via Zbigniew Rybczynski’s celebrated short film, Tango (1980). The latter is represented by the single room in which the action develops, and the jerking movements of the actors although their movements don’t attempt to match the clever dispersal of Rybczynski’s characters. We’re not exactly starved of unusual juxtapositions these days but a Salò/Tango mash-up is something I wouldn’t have expected to see. Watch it here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Tango